A Clown Joke

Pagalache the clown walks into a patisserie. Behind the marble stands the owner, a man with cold hands and a folded white life, who looks up from his wiping and says we’re closed; and Pagalache, who has never in his life heard a closed thing, says: she had a smell. You have to start at the smell, he says, or none of the rest of it lands. She smelled like the inside of a tuba; the spit valve specifically, not the bell, any idiot loves the bell. He loved the valve: the warm brass and the held breath of a hundred dead parade songs, a little rotten, a little gold. He would stand downwind of her at the cannon and let it fill him like a feedbag. She came off the high wire glazed, just glazed, the sawdust crusted into the sweat on her, and he told her once he would eat that crust off her shoulder with a spoon and she told him to get a bigger spoon, and that, he says, leaning his orange fingers on the clean glass, was the courtship entire. There was no second date; the first one never…